The Frozen Man

by Lex Sinclair

  “No one would ever believe my outlandish tale for the townsfolk lacked perspective in such matters that are inexplicable. I too would’ve never believed such a tale if it had been one of the townsfolk or farmers talking such nonsense - but it was I who had the misfortune to make the discovery on that cold winter night.

  “I retired to my room on the first floor. Sleep came quickly, but the dreams assailed me. For what the dreams were about I fail to remember, and for that I am overly glad. Because I have learned in such a short time that extreme horror often paralyses memory in a compassionate way.”

  Charles stopped reading and gazed at the other three staring wide-eyed at him.

  ‘I know I’m not all that intelligent, and what I’m about to say will make me sound even more stupid’ Carlton said, ‘but what the hell is that supposed to mean?’

  Seeing that all the eyes were fixated on him, Charles began to explain. ‘Well, first of all, this fellow has found a body hanging from the treetops. Then he has taken the body with him and buried it on his land. Not long after that he starts to have bad dreams, which he can’t recall... I don’t think this book isn’t going to give us a precise answer on how to get us out of the mess,’ he said.

  Tom leaned forward. ‘Do you mean to tell us, we’ve driven all this way, given up our Saturday, just to be told more pointless, spooky tales that you have read?’

  Charles swallowed hard. He didn’t know what to say. ‘How can you expect a book from the library to give us exact answers, its nuts?’

  Tom excused himself and went to use the restroom.

  ‘I’ve been having really awful nightmares which I can’t remember and so has Carlton. I just wanted to know if you or Tom were suffering from the same symptoms. This is either an amazing coincidence or there are parallels to the accounts in here and what we did,’ he told Kate, tapping the page he’d read from.

  She shrugged. ‘Well, neither I nor Tom has had these nightmares you’re talking about. What we do have, though,’ she said lowering her voice so no one overheard her, ‘is a corpse in the garage, because I foolishly trusted you. Why should we trust you ever again?’

  ‘Because your lives might be at stake,’ he said.

  Kate stopped abruptly. She didn’t know what to say. Instead her mouth fell open and her eyes widened.

  Tom returned to the booth a little calmer. He had washed his face and told himself to just listen and not react or say anything until Charles was finished.

  Then he noticed the slackness in his wife’s pallid features and body language.

  ‘C’mon, let’s get out of here before he bores us with another one of his shitty stories,’ he said, holding his hand out for her to take.

  ‘I think you better sit down and listen to this, Tom,’ she muttered, dazed.

  Tom’s shoulders slumped. ‘Oh, I don’t bloody believe this. You’re not falling for this old fart’s nonsense again, surely?’

  ‘Tom, our lives may be at risk if we don’t listen to him.’

  Tom could feel the colour drain from his face. He sat down hard, stunned.

  Charles thanked him. ‘I didn’t want to have to say it like that,’ the old man said.

  ‘But I can’t allow you to go away from here knowing I could’ve done more to help, that’s all.’ He took a sip of his steaming tea and then placed back on the coaster. ‘The tale my father told me - the one I told you is based on a true story, according to my father it was, anyway. But the more I read in this tome and the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the story was a lot more real than what we gave it credit for: not just because we found the body in the forest, although that in itself makes it tangible. There are many other identical similarities in here to consider. This has been, apparently, going on for centuries. People, like us, killing or discovering bizarre corpses that no one seems to be aware of, or care about. Don’t you think it is kinda strange that neither the local or national news has reported a missing body that matches the one we saw?’

  Kate glanced at Tom. ‘You’ve been checking the news constantly, haven’t you?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And what did you find?’ Charles asked.

  ‘Nothing. There’s been no news not even in the local papers of a missing person or anything.’

  ‘According to this book,’ Charles went on, ‘of all the frozen dead bodies, not one single person reported a missing person case or a dead body to the authorities. Why is that?’

  No one had an answer.

  ‘The tale I told you was bequeathed to my father by his father and so on till God knows when. Probably since the dawn of time.’ Charles gazed out the window, seeing if the rolling thunderclouds had burst opened yet. ‘Do you know that these extraordinary humans, like the Nathan fellow I told you about, are not all good, like an angel? There are some frozen men and women, who were evil. And I mean really evil, too.’

  Charles opened the tome up to another place he had kept with a different bookmarker. He waited for the group to sip some more of their tea and coffee, prior to going on.

  “The rain of terror crashed down upon me as I strolled through the graveyard before the twilight. I have never heard nor have I ever seen or wished to have seen such macabre as I saw that summer. My whole body trembled at the blasphemous sight before me silhouetted in the scorching sun. A fit of anxiety overcame me, causing me to stagger and fall on the cobbled path. As I righted myself the thing I saw appeared to have grown nearer. Yet that was impossible.

  For nothing dead can move - can it? I wondered.

  “Perched on a headstone, fixing its lifeless eyes on me was a putrid cadaver staring me. It seemed to take tremendous amusement of my uncontrollable fear, of that I could see because of its wicked smirk.

  “Why hadn’t I fled? Surely my wisdom would’ve told me that was the safer option by far - but it didn’t. Instead it held me captive gawking at the ungodliness, staring at me. Only now in my dying years can I admit to being fascinated by what I saw that day. I astonished myself as I felt my legs carrying me unwillingly toward the sinister corpse.

  “I stood before it in all its repulsive glory, a twisted, grey, brittle, monstrosity; reached out and touched the sizzling flesh. Of what I understood, was the decaying body had been dead not long, and that I had been the first to see it in its rotting form.

  “A short sharp gasp escaped me when I noticed the heap of soil beside me; a hole in the ground; a coffin open and empty of its rightful proprietor. I whirled around, searching for the perpetrator of this dreadful act, and only whirled round again when I was confident whomever it had been had fled (like I should’ve done). I scarcely recollect the reasons for my actions, but I do know I departed the graveyard with unexpected, grisly luggage on my journey home that same afternoon.

  “Astoundingly, I reached my home without a single soul catching me in the act, much to my relief later on when I only then realised what I had done. The walk home with the rotting corpse on my back to this day is a daze to me. I dragged the grotesque body, which to my knowledge was certainly not of any shape or form of anyone human or animal of this world, into the living room. I sat at the table and wiped the dripping perspiration with a cloth and ogled the corpse folded in half, dozing, beside the sideboard. Its innocent posture replaced my repulsion into pity and sorrow. After all what harm could a corpse do anyone? However, at the time I had forgotten that the corpse was nothing of this world but from another time and place.

  “Wisdom grows with age, of that I firmly believe as I grew older. I grew to believe that no one of this world must know of my peculiar discovery for the sake of mankind for now and for ever. For there are some things which are unspeakable and should be left untold to protect the innocent who have no comprehension of what shared my residence till these final years of my existence.

  “Two weeks had passed surprisin
gly swift and nothing strange occurred.

  Then one night, I lay on my bed, wide awake wondering what I had done, and if I should take the hideous corpse back to the graveyard where I discovered it.

  Yet if I did that there was a chance I would be not as fortunate as previously, and be seen carrying out this awful act. I was deliberating my options when I heard a soft scraping noise on the floorboards somewhere downstairs. I uttered a tiny whimper, inadvertently. I clapped a hand over my mouth, sealing it shut.

  Just like when I was in the graveyard, I found I couldn’t move because of the sudden shock. I listened for any more sounds, but all I could hear was the beating of my frantic heart and my erratic breathing. I stayed under the duvet, staring wild-eyed at the bedroom door.

  “Sometime, how much I am not certain, went by till eventually my breathing and my heart returned to the respiratory levels. I even chuckled quietly at my vivid imagination conjuring all sorts of dreadful scenarios that could’ve occurred. I got comfortable once more in my warm, cosy bed and was about to welcome sleep, when the green phosphorescent mist lit up the dark, drifted under the aperture between the door and threshold and hovered over my bed.

  God only knows - or maybe He doesn’t - what this phosphorescence might have been shrouding me in the middle of the night. However, I made assumption since that terrifying night: it wasn’t a dream or a hallucination - it was as tangible as the pen I am using to write this confession is to me. What I saw had something to do with the corpse, which now occupied the closet at night and the living room during the day.

  “My assumption, albeit vague, is this: the phosphorescent light came from the body of another life form, floated up the stairs to my room - for what purpose I’m afraid I shall never know. I must have lost consciousness at some time shortly after because when I awoke it was morning. The radiant sun burst through my bare window, dazzling me out of my deep slumber. To clarify that I heard no noise the night before, I hurried to the ground floor, opened the closet and was overly relieved to find the grotesque shape had not moved. It was in the exact same position as I had left it the previous evening.”’

  Charles stopped reading, removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  ‘How does that account apply to us?’ Carlton asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Charles said.

  ‘Well, the body the storyteller said he’d found in the graveyard wasn’t in a block of ice or sheathed in nest of peculiar hair. The person wrote that the body wasn’t human, that it was a monstrosity.’

  ‘Carlton, when you climbed the pine tree to cut the body down that day, did you by any chance, take a good long look at it?’ Charles asked.

  Carlton shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t. I made sure not to.’

  ‘Did it ever baffle you like it did me, that a dozen strands of silvery, stretchy type of hair - if you can call it that - was holding a dead body encased in a block of ice, equivalent to the size and weight of a large coffin?’

  Carlton was about to shake his head again, when Kate interrupted. ‘The block of ice the body had been encased in has in melted, hasn’t it, Tom?’

  Tom glanced at her, and then nodded in agreement.

  ‘Oh dear God!’ Charles gasped.

  They all stared at him.

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’ Carlton said.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Charles said, putting his glasses on the table, staring directly at Kate, and then averting his panic-stricken gaze. ‘Please tell me that you’re lying, Kate?’

  ‘No she’s not,’ Tom said. ‘Kate wanted to get a closer look at the thing, so she put it next to the radiator and turned the heating up to the max, and to her joy the block of ice melted in no time at all.’

  ‘No!’ Kate cried. ‘That’s not why I did it. I melted the block of ice because otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to carry it up to the loft.’

  ‘Keep your voices down!’ Charles hissed.

  They all stopped talking for a couple of minutes, drank from their mugs, and then ordered another round of teas and coffees. And Carlton ordered another doughnut. This time, however, no one took any notice.

  Charles closed his eyes and welcomed the dark. The dark was good... very good. He just wished he had the silence to go with it as well.

  ‘What’s so bad about melting the block of ice?’ Kate asked him.

  Hesitantly, he flicked his eyes open and said in a shaky voice that didn’t sound like his own, ‘According to this book, if you ever find a body like what we did then you are warned not to melt it under any circumstances. It even advises the person or persons who make such a discovery to keep the ice stored in a cool place.’

  ‘Why? What happens if it does melt?’ Tom said.

  Charles lowered his gaze to his steaming cup of coffee. He couldn’t look Tom in the eyes he was so afraid of telling them the awful answer. Nevertheless he and Kate had a right to know, although it would upset them greatly and kill whatever chance of friendship they could’ve had with one another when this ordeal was over.

  ‘Tell me,’ Tom insisted.

  ‘You’re not going to like it,’ Charles said. ‘Anyway, who’s to say that this book is accurate? It could be a load of made up nonsense, like you said.’

  ‘Charles,’ Tom said, his face turning a scarlet, ‘either you tell me or I come over there and beat the crap out of you. And don’t think that I won’t.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he said. ‘According to the book which may not be altogether true - it say’s the consequences of melting the block of ice will be dire.’

  ‘Ohmigod,’ Kate gasped.

  Tom put an arm around his wife, who buried her head in her hands. ‘Why?

  Why are the consequences dire, Charles?’

  Charles glanced at the other customers and the waiter behind the counter, who were all stealing furtive looks at them. ‘Perhaps we had better finish our drinks and get the hell out of here,’ he said, over Kate’s sobbing.

  ‘When this is all over I’m gonna beat you so bad, you piece of shit, you’re gonna beg me to kill you!’ Tom said.

  Charles gulped. ‘O-Okay... but let’s just get out of here before we attract any more nosy diners.’

  Charles put a twenty pound note down on the table, covering the bill by more than twice the amount.

  Tom escorted Kate outside with a clumsy arm wrapped over her shoulder. An obese man sitting at the table nearest the entrance eating a full English breakfast with a severed sausage speared on his fork halfway to his mouth, stared as they passed him.

  ‘What the hell are you looking at you, fatty?’ Tom barked.

  The man who was too overweight to hardly move let alone take Tom on in a brawl, sat unmoving. Instead he sighed loudly and wiped the glistening beads of sweat off his forehead and continued to devour his ample, high-cholesterol meal, embarrassed and depressed.

  Charles followed the group outside into the steady drizzle, clutching the tome in the carrier bag as he stood on the deserted pavement. ‘Where’s your car parked?’ he asked Tom.

  ‘Over there.’ Tom pointed to his Vauxhall in the town centre car park.

  ‘Can we all get in? That’s the only way we’re gonna get privacy.’

  Tom didn’t respond. He waited for the flow of traffic to pass before crossing the road, still with his arm comforting Kate, towards his stationed vehicle. They all got in and closed the doors just in time for the drizzle to turn into a torrential downpour that drummed its heavy fingers on the windows and roof.

  ‘Answer my question you lousy bastard!’ Tom yelled, looking over his shoulder at Charles, who was seated next to Carlton in the back.

  ‘Supposedly, if the ice melts,’ he said, wasting no time in answering, ‘the body then becomes exposed, and like any other corpse, will begin to rot until all that’s left is the sk
eleton. The Frozen Man is meant to be frozen when they have deceased - hence the title they’re given - so they can live for ever. Anyone who exposes them is interfering with powers far more advanced than ours and venturing into the unknown.

  ‘From there it becomes unclear as to what actually happens to the person or persons, except to say that the consequences are dire. I would’ve said something but nobody mentioned about melting the ice when I spoke to you the other day,’ he said, in his defence.

  ‘Well that’s just fuckin’ marvellous,’ Tom growled.

  ‘Is there anything we can do to prevent this?’ Carlton asked.

  Charles shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. As I said it’s not clear from there on. The rest is a lot of speculation from the so-called experts.’

  Carlton finished off the last of his doughnut in advance to speaking again, still chewing, ‘What if we get the body and freeze it again so that it’ll be preserved like before? It may not have a block of ice around it, but it’ll still be frozen, right?’

  They all regarded him, silently thanking this one-hundred and ninety-pound, muscular, athletic young man who had been stuffing his face with doughnuts for the best part of the morning for his brilliant, intelligent suggestion.

  ‘That’s a great idea. That’s what we ought to do.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kate said, encouraged by Carlton’s positive attitude to such a negative dilemma.

  ‘Have you seen the condition of the body, lately?’ Charles wanted to know.

  ‘I haven’t,’ Tom said.

  ‘Neither have I,’ Kate said.

  ‘Well, what we need to do before anything else, is see if the corpse has started rotting, or if it is damaged in any way before we get our hopes up,’ Charles said.

  ‘What if it has begun decomposing?’ Carlton asked, after swallowing the last of his fattening breakfast.

  ‘One thing at a time, all right. One thing at a time. Although, I’m not sure how we’re gonna freeze it like it was before.’